Overlooked, an exhibition of outsider art.

Overlooked is an exhibition, with talks and workshops, inspired by Outsider Art
and overlooked artists and architecture.
It is funded by Arts Council England and promoted as a RIBA 'Love Architecture' 2013 event.

Overlooked is housed in a seaside surburban semi which inspired a five year series of Arts Council funded installations called Leave Home Stay - see www.leavehomestay.com -  in which the artist curator, Christine Finn, also lives.

The exhibition will feature work by two artists from Outside In, an arts agency providing a platform for artists who find it difficult to access the art world either because of mental health issues, disability, health, social circumstance or because their work does not conform to what is normally considered to be art. 

The artists Ian Sherman and Elzbieta Harbord, will show their work in two sitting rooms, with Ian's studio reconstructed as a series of photographs.

Elzbieta Harbord’s black and white ink drawings will be a part of the show, as well as the drawings she creates on plates which will be displayed on a dining table.

Photographer Andy Hood, who is also an Outside In artist, is producing a series of photographs documenting Ian's house and work space.  These will be installed in the two front rooms of the house.
The artists will talk about their work on Saturday, 22nd, 11am.

Two other artists from Outside In will run a workshop on the naive Cornish seaside artist, Alfred Wallis, on Saturday, 22nd, 2 - 4 pm. This is a n event from Outside In: Step Up, a subsidiary of Outside In, which trains artists facing barriers to research and deliver workshops, equipping them with numerous transferable skills.

A dining room at Golf Road will house a series of works by the Beat Hotel photographer, Harold Chapman. The installation is inspired by photos hanging to dry in his 1950s attic bedroom in Paris. The Beat Hotel was an informal collective of creative outsiders. Chapman lived there for several years, photographing Ginsberg, Burroughs and other writers and artists before they were well known and accepted. The art they left in the building was in itself overlooked and lost when the run-down hotel finally closed. Chapman was the last to leave.

Upstairs, a bedroom will be filled with work on loan from Valetudo, the art therapy unit set up at the hospital in St. Remy-de-Provence, where Vincent Van Gogh was treated, and where he painted some of his best-known work. Valetudo is part of the working hospital specialising in women's mental health. The 20 paintings in Deal have been inspired by Van Gogh's life and work. Some have recently been exhibited in Tokyo and at the School of Visual Arts in New York; others have never been exhibited before.

Another bedroom will house an installation inspired by Finn's visit to St.Remy in 2006, and buying a piece of art from Valetudo. It will comprise an audio piece of birdsong recorded in her garden, and at St.Remy, and extracts of letters sent by Van Gogh from the hospital. They will be voiced by the actor Michael Maloney, who will also do live readings on Saturday 22nd and Saturday 29th, 7pm. Free with collection for Prostate Cancer UK.

A further bedroom will house small works made to encourage scrutiny of overlooked architectural features. A family workshop, 'Rear Window', will encourage participants to make art inspired by the view over neighbouring gardens and houses.

Another bedroom will be the venue for a series of talks. Christine Finn will talk about what inspired Overlooked, and growing up in a dyslexic family. Sunday, 23rd, 11am. http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/artblog+society/dyslexia

Finn will also talk about the work of Susan Kruse, an autistic artist and curator of the Library of Lost Books project, on Sunday, 23rd, 1pm.

Dr. Jenny Tillotson, Reader in Sensory Fashion at Central St. Martin's, who will talk on wellness, creativity and the bipolar condition, Sunday, 23rd, 2.30pm.

Throughout the show's run - 22 - 30th June - the unkempt garden will be available for visitors to make art in.

The Outside In artists will be in Deal for the PV on Friday, 21st June, prior to their talk and workshop on 22nd.

OVERLOOKED

58 Golf Road, 

Deal, Kent

22nd June - 30th June

Free admission